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donkeyrock shared this story from  I, Cringely.
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Who owns your telephone number? According to Section 251(b) of the Communications Act of 1934, you own your number and can move it to the carrier of your choice. But who owns your texting phone number? It’s the same number, just used for a different purpose. The law says nothing about texting so the major wireless carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon) are claiming that number is theirs, not yours, even if you are the one paying a little extra for unlimited texting. And the way they see it, unlimited is clearly limited, with carriers and texting services not offered by the Big Four expected soon to pay cash to reach you.
Those who’ll pay to text you include mobile carriers not in the Big Four led by the largest independent, US Cellular, as well as so-called over-the-top texting service providers that presently offer free texting services. These companies include pinger.com, textplus.com, textnow.com, textme.com, and heywire.com. Service continues for now but the incumbents are threatening to shut it down any day. T-Mobile started trying to impose fees several weeks ago and Sprint, I’m told, will start trying to charge next week.
Verizon shut off texting access to their network for two weeks starting April 3 as a shot across the bow of the over-the-top (OTT) carriers. Texting suddenly stopped working for OTT users, supposedly to limit spam texts. It quickly became documented that 98 percent of SMS SPAM was coming from ATT and T-Mobile SIM card fraud, which was not affected by the OTT cut-off, so the Verizon switch was turned back on, though OTT carriers were now on warning.
This is tied, by the way, to the emergence of a new business — 800 texting. Want to report a problem to your cable company or check your bank balance? Send them a text. This was supposed to become a big business but now may not even start because the providers who make it possible are all OTT. The incumbent carriers don’t enable 800 texting because they don’t have the technology. This is their way of getting a piece of this new business.
For that matter, the carriers also didn’t have the ability to do billing for this type of service so they asked the two large US SMS aggregators (SAP & Syniverse) to track it on their behalf, which they have reportedly done. Now it’s just a matter of pulling the trigger.
Texting used to mean big bucks to mobile carriers back …read more
Source:: Donkeyrock_BlurBlog
